Kansas Rises Up Against the Trickle-Down Con Job

The Republican Legislature and much of Kansas has finally turned on Gov. Sam Brownback in his disastrous five-year experiment to prove the Republicans’ “trickle down” fantasy can work in real life — that huge tax cuts magically result in economic growth and more, not less, revenue. Kansas has painfully found otherwise: State revenues dwindled along with job growth. Budget deficits ballooned. Education funding plummeted, and the state suffered multiple credit downgrades as Mr. Brownback played the mad doctor of supply-side economics.

It took too long, but state lawmakers who once abetted the Brownback budgeting folly passed a two-year, $1.2 billion tax increase this week to begin repairing the damage. To make it stick, they overrode a veto by Mr. Brownback, who remains a blithe champion of the supply-side shell game, as do many other Republicans, despite the failure of what the governor called his “real-life experiment” and its calamitous impact on vital services.

President Trump’s federal tax proposals are rooted in the same supply-side nonsense. And Speaker Paul Ryan, the House’s supposed guru in the continuing budget fights, embraces the trickle-down mantra he practiced as an aide to Mr. Brownback when the governor was in the Senate.

Mr. Brownback rode the Tea Party wave to the governor’s office in 2010 and was re-elected in 2014. His tax cuts reduced rates and the number of brackets, and created special privileges for small businesses, much like President Trump’s dodgy proposals. The governor’s plan was so phantasmagorical that it envisioned a “march to zero” goal of eventually eliminating income taxes.

Voters were the first to call the governor’s bluff, ousting more than a dozen of his legislative supporters in last year’s elections as punishment for damaged school services, potholed highways and near recession. The state’s gross domestic product grew just 0.2 percent last year, compared with 1.6 percent nationally. State school aid slipped from $4,400 per pupil to $3,800 in the Brownback years, with the poorest districts suffering the worst, according to court findings that the State Constitution was being violated.

Supply-side economics have been shopped by Republican politicians since the Ronald Reagan administration. “My focus,” Mr. Brownback foolishly promised, “is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, ‘See, we’ve got a different way, and it works.’” Instead, the model imploded. Voters should beware of any political huckster, including President Trump, who tries to sell it. It will take years for Kansas to recover, but Mr. Brownback, far from apologetic, remains trickle-down’s Candide, noting how “heartened” he is by the Trump tax cut plan.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Kansas Vetoes the Trickle-Down Con Job. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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